The Bible, echoing and consolidating what we already have learned by ourselves, tells us that God is faithful, but mankind not so. God is good, but again, mankind can be good, but often isn’t. God is everything that mankind is not, so it seems.
That almost makes it look like we made God up, to compensate for our own built-in law of failure. The atheist loves to think so, but his assertion is only surfing, not diving, and until you take that flying leap and plunge to the depths, you can’t know.
Know what? That there is a God. That we are fallen. That He doesn’t change, He’s constant, and His constancy is what we can rely on, we can be confident that the world He placed us in is, like Him, going to be there for us, giving us room to find out.
Find out what? That the God that doesn’t change, moves. That mankind that changes, is static. That there are different kinds of changelessness, and different kinds of change, some good, some bad, all depending on point of origin and direction.
What God is, He is, without change. What we are, that is, what He made us, we are and will always be. That’s the image. We can’t change that. All we can do is discover it. God’s direction is always toward us. That makes Him good. That, too, is changeless.
Everything we think, or know, ourselves to be changes. Mankind in the bulk, and you and me in the fine, are nothing but change. If fate exists, then it’s our fate. We must change. Our change is good when it’s toward God, and it’s bad when it’s away from Him.
That’s the only criterion we have, the basis of our conscience as we experience it. Now apply all this to what we see in daily life, in our relationships, in our families, in our social mores, in our legal and financial systems, in everything from day one till today.
History is the story of how mankind has thrown up barriers and resisted to his uttermost breath the pull of God, substituting the push of man for it in everything. God doesn’t change. He keeps pulling us, tugging at us. We want to stay put, and we push back.
The worst place we can possibly be when we are pushing back against the pull of God—‘No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him’ (John 6:44)—is in the Church, because that’s the one place where we can be sure it’s Him pulling us.
Now, the Church is bold enough to assert that like God, she also doesn’t change. This is without doubt what God intends. But like Himself, ‘My Father goes on working, and so do I’ (John 5:17)—the God that doesn’t change, moves, and so must the Church.
Why? Because the Church is not God. The Church is man. In her point of origin, which cannot change, she is divine. In her direction, like the man that she is, she must change. In which direction spells either decay or growth. At every moment, one way or the other.
Who is drawing you? Who is pulling you? Only One does that, and it is always to Himself. Your response is always to say ‘Yes’ and ‘Let it be.’ Change, then, is the beginning of redemption. Who is pushing you? What is claiming necessity on your life, that has no right?
We must look at ourselves, and at the Church if we know we are members of her, and ask ourselves, who or what is trying to commandeer change in us, or in the Church? Who or what is playing ‘bait and switch’ with us, calling good evil, and evil good?
Want the changelessness that is God’s, that which moves, because that’s what He wants for us. Want the change that brings us to our point of origin, the Father, by not resisting His pull. Remember, He has turned over to us the keys of the Kingdom. Use them.
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